Exhibited Works

I believe things happen for a reason, including divergent modes of self-expression. I believe in reconciliation of objects, surrogacy, marginalized craft forms, evidence-gathering, fiber, photography, faith, emotional and intuitive proof, and eidetic memory. I believe we will figure this out together, or not at all.

The Lounge of Saturn

Popps Packing is pleased to present our winter salon show, The Lounge of Saturn. Saturn is known as the mythological god of generation, dissolution, plenty, wealth, agriculture, periodic renewal and liberation as well as the god of time.

Andrew Thompson, Megan Heeres, Michael Nagara, and Sarah Rose Sharp respond to the conundrum of iteration. Or was it “reiteration”? Iterating through repetitions of marks, materials, or even scales, we utter over-and-over again:
‘We are artists.’
‘This is art.’

Emotion Totems were constructed as a temporary and interactive installation for the second annual Jefferson-Chalmers Riverfont Arts Festival, from August 19-26, 2017. They serve as the permanent fixture of the weeklong festival, amidst a host of other performance projects and programming over the course of the week.

The Detroit incinerator is one of the longest-running environmental health issues for folks here in the city. For art with a conscience, come check out THE INCINERATOR SHOW at Ocelot Print Shop, featuring work that tackles this issue. I have three screen-print-based fiber pieces inspired by Detroit’s own Better Made potato chip bags, countless numbers of which are no doubt burned up in the incinerator every day!
Show Runs: June 15 to 23, 2017; open during Allied Media Conference and the Rust/Resistance Cultural Crawl

‘Preserving Identity’ is a community curated art exhibition, exploring Muslim American identity–however that looks like–through found objects. As part of this project, we’ve asked local Muslim American youth in the Detroit and surrounding communities to find a jar and place objects that resonate with elements of their identity. The focal point of this gallery is thus a collection of these jars, situated on an open-frame black cube, representative of a broad number of Muslim Americans with different interests, intersecting identities (e.g. race, class, gender, ethnicity), and varied personalities. In this way, the personal narratives of what it means to be uniquely Muslim and American is quite literally centralized.

“Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love—from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter—to monstrously remote points in the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae.”
~ Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
Heart is the first featured artist project in the Simone DeSousa Gallery EDITION space, on display from January 14-February 26, 2017.
Images by P.D. Rearick, Artography, LLC

Of the many qualities that may compromise one’s womanly appeal, there is none so negative as the crime of complexity. Be ditzy, if you must, be a stone cold bitch—but never dare to embody conflicting sentiments! Who would be willing to do all the work of figuring you out, if you have the audacity to contain multitudes?
I regard art as an opportunity to understand that the world around us is not whole cloth, but a calculated presentation of ideas. What happens when we start to pull at the threads of these identities? Girlfriend Material treats these found objects and archetypes as the raw material for reconfiguration into works that are as complex and challenging as we know ourselves to be.

Simone DeSousa Gallery‘s annual holiday limited edition exhibition furthers the gallery’s mission to engage and nurture a new audience of contemporary art collectors, as well as explore the various dialogues occurring between art and design today.
The Disease Cycle (EDITION/16) is an evolution of my ongoing EDITION/15 series of “time logs,” which deal with abstractions of time and the accrual of lived experience. Just as life grows from the smallest points of origin, so disease may build from the smallest variation, flaw or intervention. How these things play out over time is beautiful, terrible, and exponential in its process.

EDITION /15 is the first installment of a new holiday exhibition tradition at Simone DeSousa Gallery, inviting represented artists, as well as local artists and designers, to create unique, small volume, collectible edition works. The exhibition furthers the gallery’s mission to engage and nurture a new audience of contemporary art collectors, as well as explore the various dialogues occurring between art and design today.
Images by P.D. Rearick, Artography, LLC